Roald Dahl kept two ideas books for about forty years. They were both old school exercise books, the first of which was sandy coloured, and the second red and very battered. He thought that good ideas were like dreams – soon forgotten – and made sure that he wrote them down straight away. He then ticked the really good ideas and crossed out the ones he had used. Some ideas were developed years and years after they were jotted down. Can you guess which books came from these ideas?
If Roald Dahl hadn’t been an author, he could have been a doctor, a boxer, a golfer, an inventor, a scientist, a botanist or a picture framer. He had a natural talent for all of these things. And he was interested in just about EVERYTHING. But here are a few of the things he was especially fascinated by:
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings
Eighteenth-century English furniture
Gardening
Orchids
Music
Wine
Gambling
Good food
Chocolate
Roald Dahl once said, ‘If I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead.’
‘Now at last we can say that spring has arrived, and with it come flocks of summer migrants, all those little birds that flew away to the warmer countries in the south when it began to get cold last October. Most of them go as far as North Africa and don’t ask me how they find their way there and back again because that is one of the great mysteries of the world. There are skylarks, greenfinches, goldfinches, whitethroats, willow-warblers, golden plovers, blackcaps, swallows, house-martins, chiffchaffs and many more besides, and soon after they arrive they pair up and start to build their nests.’
In 1929, when he was thirteen, Roald Dahl was sent to boarding school. You would expect him to get wonderful marks in English – but his school reports were not good!
EASTER TERM, aged 15. English Composition. ‘A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.’
SUMMER TERM, aged 16. English Composition. ‘This boy is an indolent and illiterate member of the class.’
There’s worse to come!
‘May is the month of the cuckoo … Everyone living in the countryside knows when the cuckoos start arriving because you cannot help hearing the loud, eerie, almost human call of the male bird. It quite literally says, “Cuck-koo, cuck-koo,” and the voice carries for miles … Unlike most other birds, cuckoos do not pair up and stay together, so there are no marriages or family life in cuckooland. No cuckoo has ever bothered to build its own nest or hatch or feed its young. The female (carrying her egg in her beak) searches the hedgerows until she finds the nest of another bird that already has eggs in it, and she slips her own egg in with the others and flies away and forgets all about it. ‘ … The mother hedge sparrow doesn’t seem to mind at all and proceeds to sit on the egg and incubate it together with her own. Little does she know what is going to happen when all the eggs hatch … the cuckoo chick grows three times as fast as the little sparrows. The overgrown baby cuckoo proceeds quite literally to push the baby hedge sparrows one by one out of the nest to die, and in the end all that is left is this grotesque, huge, fluffy cuckoo chick filling the entire nest. The hedge sparrow parents don’t seem to notice what has happened and they go on feeding this murderer until in the end it is big enough to hop out of the nest and fly away without so much as a thank you!’
Roald Dahl’s father died when Roald was only three so his mother brought up him and his sisters on her own.
Every Easter she rented a house in Tenby, Wales, and took all the children there for a holiday.
The house, called The Cabin, was right next to the sea. When the tide was in, the waves broke right up against one wall of the house. Roald and his sisters used to collect winkles and eat them on slices of bread and butter.
‘June is the month of the foxglove, perhaps the most beautiful of all the wild flowers. The foxglove also gives us a drug called digitalis which is valuable to doctors in treating heart conditions. Barley is already standing tall in the fields. Don’t confuse it with the other two main cereals, wheat and oats. Barley has long itchy spikes covering the seeds, and if you pick one of these heads and slip it under the sleeve of your jacket or shirt with the long spikes pointing downwards, the head will actually climb all the way up to your shoulder as you walk along swinging your arm.
‘During this month the tadpoles in the ponds are beginning to sprout tiny arms and legs, and soon they will be turning into small frogs. Be nice to frogs, by the way. They are your friends in the garden. They eat the beastly slugs and never harm your flowers. There is so much beauty in the countryside in June. The lovely pink dog roses are in full bloom along the hedges and wild honeysuckle is plentiful.